Notes about the code

The main difference from the original XPath Analyzer is that you can navigate
into an XML document using qualified names. It is also possibile to have a
default namespace in the XML document. In this case a the namespace prefix will
be def, so that you can refer to it in your xpath expression.

Let's say that, for example, we have an XML document that looks like this
one:

That is, as you may have guessed, the navigation menu of a simple website. If
you need to get the Product 3 link, you should write an XPath query
like:

/items/item[@title='Products']

but this query won't give any result! This because you need to specify that
the elements items and item belongs to the default
namespace http://site/menu as it really is, otherwise the parser
will understand that they aren't associated with any namespace.So, the
correct query is:

/def:items/def:item[@title='Products']

in order to run correctly this query you first need to define that the prefix
def points to the default namespace URI. With the Advanced XPath
Analyer you can just manually add the namespace or ask to it to detect it
automatically, but what really happens behind the scenes?Three steps are
needed to make the XPath query run without errors:

Where prefix and uri are the variables that
contains the relative values, and navigator is the
XPathNavigator that you're using to navigate through the document.

Using the program

You have to specify the XML source file (which can be a file on your hard
disk or a file somewhere in the web) and then the XPath Query you'd like to
test. You can also specify a SQLXML url so that you can test your SQLXML
Queries. If your XML uses namespaces you have to add it in the left panel so
that you can use them in your XPath Query, otherwise you can detect it
automatically, clickin' on the Detect Namespace button. Of course
remember to do this before you analyze the XPath Query!

Location of XML document:

http://localhost/nwind/schema/schema1.xsd/Employees?root=root

XPath query:

//root/Employees

History

v 1.0: First version

v 1.1: Added automatic namespace discovery

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

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About the Author

Born in 1977, works as a freelancer, focusing on Database / Software Architecture.In the free time writes articles for two of the major Italian programming magazines (Computer Programming and VBJ) and also develops nice and useful programs.His major interests and skills are the .NET framework (C# in particular) and SQL Server.

In the bookstore.xml example, the "bk" namespace refers to "urn:samples". You have to add it to the namespace window before clicking on "Analyze". You can add a new namespace through the "New Namespace" window, positioned on the right.Once done that it will work fine, giving you 4 nodes.